Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  Like the navigator natives on Darwin,

  a little flap of cloth would recharge

  the whole person’s perceptions:

  I did this by buttoning and unbuttoning

  my shirt as I rode; it was rare

  and to be remarked upon

  To see an open shirt

  on the way to Esher;

  I am still the boy riding there

  Or as far as Guildford

  among the buzzing, the coloured

  and tactile images. Once

  I stopped at a cinema on the way:

  a woman in ample Victorian dress

  slipped and fell into a garden pond

  In which she sat enraged, her beige skirt

  struck shit-colour instantly,

  with a shine –

  What a vision! even women could get

  sexy-wet, especially women; Jesus

  offered living water to the women

  At her well, but these were cunni-waters

  and her own element and familiar.

  Come and be well! my skin

  Was transparent as water

  with that vision of exterior cunt.

  She offered her pond,

  The woman in the flowing shirts,

  and in the Song, the woman lover

  is a fountain of living waters.

  I could not send these visions away,

  not for long anyway,

  they were an ultimate for me.

  The Sin is not the visions,

  but is quenching the visions:

  quench not the Spirit (1, Th. 5.19);

  I knew something too of

  the dry water of the alchemists

  it was the vibratory

  And streaming atmosphere my mother

  could make in bed, and she was wise

  with the bouquet of her skin,

  Her dreaming breath, and mine.

  How that woman of the pond

  glittered in her new clothes;

  What is that dream

  you are having this instant;

  how her jet necklaces shine

  Like stars that are dark

  and bright at once;

  out of her belly

  Living water, water

  that will not be quenched.

  DENTIST-CONJURERS

  The dentist-conjurers,

  initiates into the white robes;

  because of all their signs –

  The sharp white coats,

  the surgical smiles and smells,

  the subtle tools that clink

  Into sonorous dishes,

  the fountain of circular water

  you spit into, and that the tooth

  Is gone, only a footprint remains,

  and the bite gone –

  you allow them into your mouth

  With their condom fingers.

  Time is altered, the teeth

  enlarged into mountain ranges;

  A rubber touch to the lip

  it strolls on the edge

  of cruelty, the deep

  Black torture-chairs

  their cushioned comfort

  awaiting pain, that see-saw

  And swing on the same touch,

  a small sharp pain

  into the gum secures

  Against a fully-developed pain

  in the darkness like a magician’s hat

  turned inside-out

  That is your mouth in which

  wispy shadow-rabbit shapes are

  reflected from the instruments

  And their rubbery touch,

  and then a rending, profoundly

  unfelt though it might be

  That the anaesthetic breaks

  and cancels, atrocious pain,

  the brink that is everywhere

  But not here, not in this mouth

  which is a shadow-play,

  a dreaming-place of

  Snapping rafters, shattered stone;

  It is my pain but feels like another’s hurt,

  borrowed calm, and I walk

  Away with one lip caught up painless

  in a snarling invisible hook

  with a ferocious lisp

  But strengthened with fresh biting power

  in a perfect gummy shell

  eating as an oyster eats,

  Flap flap the

  digestible pap now rules

  O.K.?

  Where does the pain go?

  everywhere but in this room

  of bright light

  And comfortable deep torture chairs.

  BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT

  Working in a little tent

  the Healers, three of them,

  under the cast-iron rafters of the echoing

  Exhibition hall;

  my daughter Z

  went into them

  And emerged shining

  like Moses off the Mount,

  would never tell me

  What happened in the

  off-white tabernacle

  that shone her up so;

  I knew it was supposed to be not touch,

  but meridians of wildfire, of bio-energy

  speeding over the skin like a

  Shunting yard at night.

  I approached the Chief Clairvoyant:

  she took one look at me,

  This old lady and said:

  ‘You’re a Glory-Boy. What do you want

  of us, Glory-Boy …’

  I was taken aback. Was it really

  or entirely that I wanted

  Own Glory, or was it truly

  To extend spirit into body

  and body to spirit. As she berated me

  I saw her clairvoyance

  By my own:

  a great butterfly or moth has fastened

  itself to her brow

  At the ‘third eye’, and its wings were

  beating over her forehead,

  as if to fly.

  APPRENTICE

  My father at the bonfire

  in the garden, under the great

  sycamore tree near the laburnum

  Into which I climbed

  to poison myself with

  its green fruit, black fruit;

  The tree of a knowledge

  that peeled scales

  from my eyes –

  Illumination and sickness

  in the tiny studs;

  my father demonstrating

  The unreeling snake

  he had made visible in the wind,

  demonstrating to me the demons

  And daemons of the smoke in the garden

  polished up by the perilous laburnum;

  demonstration of the horses

  Of fire stampeding in their smoky stables,

  the doors of smoke opening and slamming

  on the lighted interiors;

  The great magician working

  and the sorcerer’s apprentice working

  clapping the planks together

  To lift into the blaze the juicy boughs;

  his cacky or khaki shirt opening and closing

  in the heat

  Spiritual earth of soldier’s shirt; his

  invisible beard and robes

  tinctured into visibility

  By the laburnum’s permission

  showing me the world that came

  on the wind that was him;

  (My mother conducted me

  between the surfing of the poplars

  telling her tales of them

  Simply of themselves on the wind, to and fro

  exchanging stories of gentle monsters,

  favourable green phantom fountains.)

  My father rushed the wind

  turning the solid wood to fluid smoke

  that travelled over the world

  Crying out laburnum! from

  the clouds where I can see to this day

  his white merlin shadows in the clouds,

  And he tend
s his bonfire

  that removes still

  innumerable further scales from

  My apprentice eyes.

  XXVI

  SHEEN

  (2003)

  TOM AS SUPERNATURAL PRESENCE

  (For Tom) OB 9.9.99

  A Guinness erect on the bar

  like a straight-backed pint

  of black cat, full

  Of black lights;

  the young black cat, he

  is a dream-presence

  Like a Guinness; it was as though

  the sealed books of his heart

  burst open; he shot out

  His bolts of warmth

  into my lap, the locked volumes

  burst their clasp;

  It binds me to him,

  he does it

  more than once,

  To ensure our friendship;

  then he glides down

  and scuds away

  Leaving my feelings aglow:

  a bonfire of animal heat

  right up to my midriff.

  I have seen him retexture his coat

  to make it fascinating;

  it glows subvisibly;

  Or he causes each hair

  to declare itself separately,

  each like a black ray

  From an invisible star; as though

  it were the nerve-endings

  he combed with his tongue,

  The plantations of blackness

  rippling as with a night-breeze in

  the moment before the first

  Star becomes visible;

  and then a swift glance

  from the gold eyes

  Like a ship floating painted black, lined

  with its great cargo

  of pleated gold-leaf;

  Or in the shadows

  at the stair-foot

  this pair of jewels

  Floating a few inches above

  the carpet, as though darkness

  were crouching to inspect

  For night-mice

  at the house-root.

  SPIRITUALISM GARDEN70

  Eating on the edge of death,

  the brink –

  green laburnum.

  Black laburnum seed, the green forbidden

  the black full of power

  sharpening the presences

  Of the garden by shifting of perception,

  the plants and trees

  offering their substances

  To make their spirits visible

  in soft green seeds in rows

  which are death;

  They must be dry and black

  rattling in the pods

  and I carried the black seeds about

  In a white box

  which would tell me all

  from second month onwards

  That happened beyond

  the portals of the worm

  to my siblings who were dead

  Evolving into the apple-trees

  of Orchard End and its laburnums;

  I climbed up the laburnum ladder

  For my lessons,

  I sat in a tree

  eating the black seed of my siblings

  Using their eyes

  to see the garden

  with everything on the trembling

  Edge of being seen, foetus, foetess,

  colloquy with my garden siblings,

  green spiritualism;

  The seasons change as I eat

  the black seeds, seeing.

  SOLID PRAYERS

  Sex as solid prayers

  full of stars!

  a high degree of reality

  In the starry turning dome-stage where

  she struts her funky stuff,

  rain, skin and sweating slightly

  To shine, making

  a heiroglyph with each

  ritual unconscious gesture

  Saying

  I am here

  I am here again

  I am here still,

  I am here there everywhere;

  she turns up her shine

  Of the three colours which are gates:

  black oral, white smile,

  rouge lips; also

  I know her from her gait

  which struts

  marching astride

  Her pelvic cask,

  she swings on her gates

  everlastingly, all smile

  Her smile everywhere

  the barrel full of womanly ale,

  hale and bellowing like a whale

  As she blows and puts her tongue out

  meaning

  I can fellate you with this.

  IN THE YEAR OF THE COMET

  The roads are long metallic

  rays of stars,

  the comet is a great

  Frozen lake flying in the sky, vibrating

  reeds, ice-waterfalls and all,

  a lake of frozen pitch flying,

  A salt marsh flying;

  a thunderclap from the blowhole;

  the spray flies up in a cloud

  in which a rainbow hovers

  like a comet’s trail

  we are passing through,

  An entrance to the comet

  in seven colours, thundering;

  that winter

  We cut steps in the gigantic ice

  and went in and out of the house

  by the lavatory window,

  Cut steps and paths

  in the frozen pitch

  and in the saltmarsh:

  Our upstairs room

  was called the Gynoecium

  because it was hers,

  And she cleaned its wide-curving windows

  so we could look out

  while we were in bed

  In the comet’s spectrum halls.

  HENRHYD WATERFALL

  Is like the bow window

  of an ancient ship

  sunk in its vale;

  In this drought

  only a little flow

  tumbles into the air

  Off the high lip of rock

  and the captain’s

  stateroom windows are

  Blind stone. There is still

  a hint of rainbow

  in the gulf

  A rainbow scent

  or sensation in the

  presence of the cliff

  Which at spate cascades

  bending its stout rainbow

  in mid-air

  Like the shining mainspring

  in a clock

  of seven colours

  Its tensions

  demonstrated

  by its colours;

  But today you see

  the fall’s foundation

  of rock, the dry

  Nether underpinning

  of the famous rainbow.

  The Fall

  Has followed us home

  and the boulders abound,

  and the stone of the hotel

  Walls seem underpinning

  for rainbows; a fly

  from the falls

  Hanging suddenly on the clear

  outside bedroom window glass

  seems a seed of that water’s

  Withdrawn force, a seed

  of that water’s force;

  it lands straddled on the glass

  Flexing its rainbow waxes

  like a black star

  with its legs stretched

  A visitor of the black underground water

  and its batwings

  Like a draughtsman’s

  perfect equilibrium

  of flying forces, like a

  Denotation water

  captured and controlled

  in an insect virility;

  One of the thirsty parched mariners

  that glide through the stone fissures

  powered by secret rainbows,

  The colours on the air

  of the speed

  of the ship’s still wake />
  at Henrhyd Falls.

  AFTERGLOW LABORATORIES71

  I poured the dry sand

  from one broken milkbottle

  to another –

  Peterstone with all his eyes open,

  the stone made of eyes,

  at Llandudno, in the Great Orme,

  In a cliff-cavern floored

  with dry sand

  like an alchemist

  with his dry water

  ora et labora: the pouring

  was a kind of prayer-work

  I poured and repoured

  in the little warm cavern or cell,

  poured flexible rock,

  Dusty rock

  with a light in it

  once I slipped on the turf

  The Orme rolled me

  to the brink of the cliff

  on the narrow pathway

  Down from my sandlab,

  one of my laboratories.

  I had at home another laboratory

  Made of fused sand, the glassware –

  how did I gather

  this impressive scene

  Of crystalline tubes,

  flasks, retorts,

  fractionating columns

  (An emblem of slowing the breath)

  chromatography-stripes,

  a kind of action-painting,

  The look of the glass furniture, the luminosity of

  the delicate transparent machinery

  mattered a lot:

  The transparency meant truth,

  the battles of the home revealed,

  boiled up in these test-tubes

  Like glass magic skeletons

  that healed with their fluid dance

  their scudding drops

  Made into the figures of a glitter-science

  whose haunting solvent-smells

  of ether, of acetone tuned

  Into a glass trance-device

  that bypassed

  my father’s angers

  My mother’s distresses.

  She combed her distresses

  my apparatus absorbed them,

  Sent them out on the air like

  dry water, and the great books

  absorbed the anger

  With their hexagonal sigils,

  for I most loved Organic Chemistry,

  its sonorous smells,

  Its linked potencies.

  At Cambridge, none of the laboratories

  were mine, all were competitive

  None contemplative,

  my vocation was alchemist not chemist,

  my laboratories were everywhere;

  Also I could not follow

  that other ritual of fertile mud

  called Rugby Football, of chemists

  Kicking a leather egg,

  much to my father’s disappointment.

  XXVII

  A SPEAKER FOR THE SILVER GODDESS

  (2006)

  LUCKBATH

  ‘We need the mud’

  C.G. Jung